Phobic (33 page)

I’m nervous to see my father—will he really be in here too? Will he be angry at me? Of course, he always seemed to be angry about something. No wonder, though, seeing as how he was just as much a murderer as my mother.

“I hope you’re up here, Joel,” I say, taking the first step.

I get the impression that I’m growing as the space between myself and the ceiling shrinks. But instead of having to duck the way Jordan did, I squint and straighten, hoping somehow this will work. Sure enough, my head goes
through
the ceiling like it’s not even there.

I emerge into an unfinished room. It’s what I imagine the attic looks like: small, about the same size as mine, and completely devoid of furniture or windows. Bare lath boards—what they used to build houses with—are exposed, the plaster sealing them oozing out through the cracks.

And though I expected to see them, the sight of men loitering aimlessly through stirs cold into the air, making me take a step back. Some sit on the naked floorboards, some stare out through a door-sized opening at the far wall.

It’s not just any opening. While I know the exterior looks like a gray and purple door with no handle, from this side it reveals the grass and linden tree standing in my yard, but as if I’m looking at it through a shimmering portal. A hidden window to the outside. I peel my gaze for a second, wondering if there’s any traces of Jordan’s axe. Probably not.

The men aren’t ghosts, exactly. Not pearly and vacant-looking the way Thomas’s ghost had been, but their bodies aren’t defined either. None of them really notice my entrance. They must be used to girls rising through their floor out of nowhere.

I can’t help my skepticism. This was their promised eternity? To spend their immortality stuck here? Still, I’m shocked to see them looking so hopeless. So miserable. I wonder which of them had been the one to buy the house from Garrett so long ago. Which of them had been the first to agree to this.

I skim faces, looking for Joel, hoping he’s not like the rest of them. But it’s not Joel I see.

My hands fly to my mouth, and I get the urge to break for it, to pour salt water over my eyes in attempt to erase the sight of Mr. Garrett. Though he’d been relatively young during our last conversation in the basement, now his hair is white, his skin loose and leathery. I catch patches of bone where skin sags away from his eyes and mouth, like he’s wearing a mask and it’s slipping off. The only reason I recognize him is the bloodstained apron over his old-fashioned clothes.

And in the corner near him stands the only woman in the room. Her form is blurred like the others’, and what looks like a cage hovers around her head.

“Mom!”

She won’t look at me. Just stares at Garrett’s lifeless body on the floor beside her. It’s here completely, not half ghostly the way the rest of them are.

“It won’t work,” Dad says softly. I don’t see him join me. One second he’s just
there.
“She’s not fully here.”

“Why
is
she here?” I ask in horror. And I take the time to goggle at my father’s immortal state, wondering how he’s here if his body is gone. He looks the same. Thin nose, glasses, droopy, forlorn expression. I wonder why he ever thought this would be a good idea. Why he ever believed
this
counted as immortality. Because they look pretty dead to me.

“She killed someone Garrett had been prepping. It tied her to this house as well, but not in the way it should have because she wasn’t sworn to him to carry out the responsibility. So Garrett’s protection wasn’t on her. Now her mind is warped. Trapped here while her body—”

“—rots in jail,” I finish. “Dad, what are any of you still doing here? I stopped it. You should be free.”

“You shouldn’t have come here,” he says.

His concentrated expression gives me the wiggins, the way he analyzes me. He never paid this much attention to me in life. No reason he should start acting like I’m his pride and joy now.

“Why did you do it?” Pledge your life to this. Kill those people. Guilt trip Joel into it.

“This is what Crenshaws do. I didn’t have any other choice.”

“Yes you did.”

Dad continues watching me like I’m an interesting specimen from one of his books. “Whatever,” I say, growing angrier. “Where’s Joel?”

“Not here,” says another figure. Could be a long-lost grandfather. At this point, I don’t care. All these men took the lives of others, just so they could keep living. I don’t know of anything more selfish.

“Why would you want this?” I ask the room. The figures ignore me, but one joins Dad’s intense staring match at me. “Any of you?”

“We were told our souls would be lost after we die,” the man says. “We didn’t want to be lost.”

“Death is just a part of being human,” I argue. “You shouldn’t try to control something that’s uncontrollable. No one can stop death. Look what happened to Garrett, what he did to people. That’s seriously wrong. And you’re all sick.”

I look again to my mother, wait for the bitterness to rise, remembering how hurt I’ve felt all these years and especially the night after I saw her in prison. Knowing the truth now, and seeing her here, I feel nothing but pity.

Time to go. I don’t know where Joel is if he’s not in here, but I can’t stand around chatting. The floor above the stairs is solid. I stomp on it a few times, unsure how I got through before. I hurry to the floating door, remembering what Ada said about it not having a handle.

“How do you get out of here?”

“Piper,” Dad says, pleading.

Not now, Dad.
I brush my hands along the unfinished walls, searching for some opening. A crevice, a crack, something.

“There’s got to be a way out.”

“Do you know what I tried to say to you that day I was able to break through?” Dad says, pivoting to follow my investigation of the space. I don’t look at him. I can’t. Not after what he’s done. “That I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, and if I could go back, I’d do things differently. I would have burned this house down.”

That gets my attention. “Yeah, but Ada—”

“Ada would have been fine. It’s just like you said, Garrett messed with something he shouldn’t have. He lied to us. He lied to Ada.”

“You mean burning down the house
would
have freed her?”

“It would have freed all of us.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

I head back to the stairs, or where I came through above them, anyway, and drop to my knees. I’ll pry up the floorboards if I have to. No way am I staying in here. I’m getting out. I dig my fingers in between boards, but they won’t budge. I need a crowbar, a sledgehammer, a crane.

But I jerk back. In a rush, Ada stands at the stairs’ head, ghostly once more. The sight of her sends my heart racing. I thought she faded when Garrett did. He said they were connected.

“Why are you still here?” I ask her.

“I told you, I am trapped.” She retrieves the hitch from the wall like I’d seen her do before. She holds it to me on the palm of her hand.

“Using this, he did something else to me to trap me in those stairs,” she goes on, gesturing to the floor—and the staircase I know lies beneath it. “But no more; you have done what I never could.”

“Let me out, Ada. This isn’t funny.” I go to step around her, but she sidesteps, blocking my way. I could go through her, but the thought alone is enough to make me shudder.

“I could never touch that elixir of his,” she says. “You have completed my final step.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think you do,” Ada says. Her indistinct eyes pour into mine like molten silver, transfixing me. Her form glides toward me. The floorboards clatter with a threatening sound.

“I could not have my vessel covered in those spots that made you look so horrid.”

“Your vessel—?”

“I was worried I had moved too quickly to complete the connection, after that boy attacked the house and harmed you instead. And Garrett—the fool—thought I was preparing you for him.”

I peer over my shoulder, to my father, my mother’s clueless figure. “So this freak thing between me and the house, it’s because of you?” My mind stumbles to grasp what’s going on. “Does that mean it would have hurt
you
instead if you hadn’t passed your connection on to me?”

Ada inclines her head as if she’s in on a secret I don’t know and takes a few steps toward me. “No, it was a transitional weakness. It will be remedied once you take my place fully.”

“Sierra—the zits—you did it.” My hand goes to the stitches at my side, and I sink my head against the wall behind me. “So you think you can what, take my body, live my life and trap me here in your place?”

Ada smiles. “My life was stolen from me. You barely live yours.”

Her words stab. I thought she was helping me. I thought she was on my side.

I attempt to straighten, force myself to hide the pain. “I live mine. I’m standing up to those kids now. I have Todd, too. And I’ll go to Interlochen. To college. Play music—”

“But you will never get out of this house without a scholarship, will you?” She raises an eyebrow.

“You—”

Ada flags a hand at me. “No, no, you failed that all on your own.”

My heart beats like it’s on the outside instead of the inside. “You can’t do this.”

“I am already doing it. I am sorry, Piper. Truly. Earlier you mentioned standing up to our oppressors. Garrett was not my main enemy. Of course, I could not bear the parallel life I was trapped in. Watching Garrett butcher people, cleaning up his mess, losing Thomas over and over. No, Augustus Garrett was not my main enemy. This house is.”

“But Thomas is still here, isn’t he? His ghost or whatever. Even if you get out…” My words die away at the cross between delight and cruel insanity on Ada’s pretty face.

“Thomas already found his vessel.”

My head spins. I thought Joel was captured for Mr. Garrett, but now it seems possible that
Thomas
has Joel.

“He’s my older brother, you sicko,” I say, picturing what she and Thomas plan on
doing
once they get our bodies. “Maybe you’re just not meant to be with him, did you ever think of that? What if you guys do all of this and end up dying or something anyway?”

Ada lifts her chin in that defiant way I noticed her do with Garrett, like she’s trying to keep a bead of water from dripping off her nose. “At least I will have moved on. I have been entombed in this house, Piper. I was trapped here in life as a servant. I am trapped here in death by a lunatic. You see?” She raises her hands again.

“Even though he is gone, I am still contained. I live on without the elixir because of the way he ended my life. I must escape.” Her see-through fingers fiddle with the device that stuck her here in the first place. I wonder how she figured out how to use it.

She’s got to be bluffing. Except my skin is now buffered smooth and I have a gash the size of Texas in my stomach.

“The fact that you’re dooming me to the same fate makes no difference?”

Ada’s face softens, and she lifts her eyes. I’m struck by the pity there. “It does make a difference.”

“Just not enough of one,” I finish.

I don’t think, I just run. But the room is so small; in no time I meet a wall. My hands flounder as if I can conjure some way to bust through the boards. I pound them with my fists.

In seconds, she’s before me. I squeal, try to turn away, but her ghostly form tags me and something cool like metal pricks my neck. The hitch gadget falls from her grasp, hits the floor with a clunk.

“I did it,” she murmurs to herself.

“No—no!” I clutch my throat, grapple at the spot. I can beat this—I can make it stop. My fingers come back wet and panic carves out pockets in my chest.

“He transferred my soul to the house,” she says, still staring at the hitch. “Now it will have yours instead.”

“This is my body, not yours,” I say, ignoring her. “MY body!”

In return, Ada ignores me, though I don’t see how she can. I thrash around inside, my system trying to fight whatever she just did.

I rub my hands along my arms. The feeling intensifies, like splinters festering under the skin. The splinters begin to crawl, separating skin from my bones. Bugs gnawing, churning and skulking.

My hands trace my body—arms, legs, face—but no matter what I do, the impressions won’t stop. Ada watches it all with this knowing look. My father looks on in pity. The other figures hardly notice I’m here at all.

“Help me,” I plead, though speaking is a struggle. “Help me, Ada, and I can help you.”

“You can do nothing for me.”

To my dismay, she’s turning more solid by the second—the way she looked in my visions—only this time the golden haze is gone. She’s painstakingly beautiful, with creamy skin and natural beauty, the kind of girl who puts Sierra to shame. My mouth drops as her hair’s color fades into a dark blonde. The same color as mine.

“Ada, I—” Nothing I say can possibly make up for what she’s been through. But she still has no excuse, no right.

“You are my only escape.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way. He ended your life—do you really want to do the same thing to me?”

“It is how I can get my life back.”

“Please—don’t,” I say, unable to control the emotion in my voice. Not when her face elongates so it’s less round and more narrow like mine. My nails bite into the skin at my cheek. Her eyes shift as well, becoming not quite so fierce and angular.

I’m trying so hard not to husk my skin away, I draw blood.

“Help me—” I wince. The scuttling. So much. Too much, they’re—too much. I force myself to speak instead of scream, especially when her face solidifies into mine so it’s almost like I’m looking at a calm mirror image of myself. “I’ll burn it down. You’ll—be free. We all will. This spell or whatever. Will stop.”

“That will trap my soul for sure. The house must never be destroyed. Your father knew that.” I look again to Dad, waiting for him to pipe up. She must not know what he told me minutes before. I wonder which of them has it right.

“Says who? Garrett?”

Ada nods.

“And you believed him?”

Ada looks to her feet. Her long yellow skirt brushes the floor. The blood that dripped from Garrett’s hand stains her shoulder.